Real Life Fantasies and the Irrelevance of Skepticism

Recently I had a mildly disturbing experience. I’ll give you some background before starting the story: over the past year or so, the way I remember certain of my dreams has come more and more to resemble the way I remember my most drunken experiences. They have at the same time become less and less fantastic, and have a tendency to include the people I see and hang out with on an everyday basis. Occasionally I have to take stock upon waking up to distinguish the memories I have in my head of the dream from memories gained through actual, drunken experience. There is very little to guide me in this.

So when, around a month ago, I woke up with the memory of wandering around my neighborhood drunk with a girl I met at a party and climbing to the roof of a boarded-up mansion with her, I couldn’t quite tell whether or not it had actually happened. None of the friends I spoke to had seen me talking to or leaving with this girl. I never passed that boarded-up mansion during my sober walks of the neighborhood. I had forgotten this girl’s name and stopped seeing her around the neighborhood. After a few weeks, I was fairly certain I had dreamed it, which left me with the unsettling feeling that I nevertheless felt that I had experienced it.

Of course, it wasn’t a dream, and I eventually received confirmation of what I felt to be true. But that I couldn’t distinguish between dream and reality without external signposts brings up a question that is not particularly new, but has to be experienced anew in each person’s case to be well understood. It has been a long time since I believed in pure, or naïve, empiricism, but the jarring effect of not being able to tell the difference between the uncanny (unheimlich) dream-perception and the uncanny drunk-perception was still a shock to me. But these are exceptional states, as Nietzsche’s inclusion of them as the pure and creative state of the poet and musician should indicate, and it might simply be their exceptional nature that causes this phenomenon.

In any case, I will admit that I have to rely on outside assistance to determine what is real. I am extremely worried about this, as a great deal of what can be considered as ‘reality’ – namely virtually everything that is not a physical phenomenon – is determined largely by what, in Heidegger’s philosophical system, which is useful for this discussion, is called the ‘idle talk’ of the ‘they,’ and following this against my own experience is an act of conformity (for those of you thumbing through your copies of Being and Time, indignant at being forced to crack your unopened but conspicuously-placed copy of a book too thick for Jim to rip, by an internet article, this is traditionally translated as ‘distantiality’) of the worst kind, rather than just following a good rule of thumb in how to distinguish the real from the unreal. This has led to such thinking as Baudrillard’s and so on, and eventually to The Matrix, and so I’m fairly certain that everybody has a good idea of what I’m illustrating here, and how fluid the border between questions of physical reality and of more abstract mental constructs really is. We are being quickly led from a discussion about whether or not the world is real to one about whether or not the ideas we hold about the world are real, or just the product of idle talk.

More interesting, to me, than the question of whether we can trust what we perceive sensually is the question of to what degree we have constructed our perception using words. The former is ultimately unanswerable – there is very little to distinguish this real world from a perfect simulation of some other world. (In fact, this is aesthetically a more attractive situation to me, and the question scientifically irrelevant so long as the world continues to do its job.) On the other hand, if we can accept that human behavior is based on certain models, and that these models don’t appear to us a priori as though handed down by some bizarre deity, then it seems that there should be an investigation into how and why these models have been created, and how useful they are for our lives. That is, archetypes and models of behavior aren’t handed over to us by some conceptual Prometheus but rather developed by us and thrown into the Great Meme Race, eventually taking out all other competitors and taking on the appearance of something essential to the world.

A concept that makes this obvious, I believe, is that of romantic love. Most people have difficulty determining whether or not they love somebody, or are in love with them, and often confuse the two states. Just as often, a few months or years later, a new relationship makes them realize that the emotion they had felt in some previous relationship wasn’t ‘really’ love, but rather some simulacra of love.

It’s true that, much of the time, the genuine article is hidden by an obfuscating sea of words that must be swept away before understanding becomes possible. Is that the case here? Or is ‘love’ just a manmade concept, which in every case is ‘mine’ (that is, invented and possessed by me, whatever forces may have influenced my invention)? Are we confused because we’ve become alienated from some authentic phenomenon, or because we made it up and refuse to acknowledge this? Does this matter at all, considering the fact that we feel just as strongly in either case, are chained to our emotions, even if invented?

In this case, and in most that resemble it, I would argue that the concept is manmade and that we’ve obscured this fact behind the clouds of language, of palaver, of ‘idle talk,’ and that this is the cause of a lot of the unhappiness and discontent that surrounds our ‘love.’ And so, yes, it does matter if we know this, regardless of how we may feel in any given case. It allows the freedom to move away from the accepted ideas of love, and either form a version of love that works for me – in each case it is a ‘me’ – or reject the idea altogether as unworkable. In other words, to overthrow the tyrannus of a factitious emotion.

I chose love because it feels more primal and has a more tenacious hold on us – has caused more unhappiness and discomfort – than concepts like honor, pride, or heroism (it has yet to trump morality, but I feel justified in leaving off a discussion of morality until the future, as it’s bound to be assigned). Any discussion of Greek history will note how the concept of arête changed between that presented in Homer and that presented in Plato, but very few discussions of love, except on the highest, most pretentiously intellectual mo-po levels, will point out that it is an idea that has changed over time, and infrequently means the same thing to any two given people – including and often especially to two people who use the same words to describe their conception of love or their feelings towards one another. So I’m arguing here against this discrepancy of understanding, entirely based on how we have used words.

The issue is how we have constructed a world out of words, and how this word-world has obscured the other, ‘realer’ world in ways that cause us all grief. None of us can change the situation if it turns out that what we believed to be the ‘real’ world was a simulation; however, a recognition of what is a model of our own construction and what is not, and the freedom and control that this recognition can afford us, is worth pursuing. This I care about and find worth my intellectual effort. Determining whether the sunlight I feel falling on my skin when I step out of the shade is authentic or simulated is something I don’t find worth that effort. Ultimately those questions don't matter, don't have answers, and barely deserve to be considered as questions.